Ed Kaim - At Least HR People Should Be Good At Updating Their Own Resumes

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Sunday, June 12, 2005

At Least HR People Should Be Good At Updating Their Own Resumes

I recently came across http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2005/06/01/423909.aspx, a blog posting in which a Microsoft human resources employee expresses their frustration over having to work with arrogant hiring managers. This posting has generated a ton of feedback, most of which has been surprisingly positive. Details of the hiring process is best described at http://saunderslog.com/?page_id=312.

I understand both sides of the argument. Defending HR, I know that it can be very hard to attract candidates that reach the bar set by MS managers. At the same time, I’ve had more bad experiences with people at MS HR than good ones so I can empathize with the hiring managers, probably due to the fact that good HR people handle your issue in one shot whereas bad ones require a lot of pushing and many iterations. Regardless, I don’t have a useful opinion on which side is more correct or how to fix the outstanding issues.

I can say—and I think a silent majority would agree—that the way this HR person handled this situation was pretty awful. Rather than driving change from within the company, the decision was made to do as much damage to the company’s image and the individual’s reputation as possible (I was tempted to use the term “suicide bomb” here). Having seen a few people do this sort of thing before, it doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me, however, is the number of people hailing this person as a hero.

How could this action be considered courageous? How could it be heroic? To me, courageous and/or heroic would be driving change in Microsoft internal policy by directly confronting the issues and people involved. Airing dirty laundry in order to embarrass the change by someone with more courage (or fear of execs destroying them over this) is a lot harder and more impressive. And no, I don’t believe this person made a reasonable effort to fix this through rational means or else it would have been mentioned in the posting.

In particular, I think that the tone and language of the posting is almost laughable. While the responsibilities are quite different, I expect HR reps to have the same composure and people skills as product managers (possibly more, considering their actual business function). This section is probably where the most damage occurs:

“Quite honestly (maybe here is where my tirade kicks in), I’m sick and tired of the Hiring Managers around here not trusting their recruiters. Hi there – news flash. Guess what? I probably have a higher IQ than you (yes, I just went there), and I “get” it. Trust me. They pay me the big bucks to be an expert on hiring for the company. You do your job; I’ll do mine. Plus, you don’t see me getting in your business every time some Microsoft program crashes on me, do you?”

To be very clear, I wouldn’t fire someone for having an opinion like this or expressing it--although it would piss me off if they had this problem and went public instead of coming to me. However, there is a good chance I would fire them for the lack of respect they clearly have for their coworkers. It’s hard to let one overly arrogant person get away with publicly embarrassing every senior manager in the company.

If you’re Microsoft, however, you can’t really do much. If you fire this person, or any of the other people who do the same kind of blogging, you’ll be unable to avoid the stigma of censorship. Heck, look at how much flak the company is taking over MSN Spaces in China. Just imagine the “Microsoft Fires Heroic Blogger In Act Of Unmitigated Censorship” headlines.

So how should Microsoft handle this situation? It’s practically impossible to fire people there, unless they break the law or commit a significant HR violation that really upsets someone. That leaves very few options, but I’d love to hear if anyone has anything clever (and legal). Assume you've already had their manager send a supporting email to keep them from doing anything rash before you've decided their fate, what would you do?

6/12/2005 10:45:58 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)